Semyon Gluzman was a Ukrainian psychiatrist and human-rights campaigner who died on February 16th 2026, aged 79. He was the first professional to publicly challenge the Moscow School of Psychiatry's abuse of the discipline for political repression in the Soviet Union.
In 1971, aged 25 and newly qualified, Gluzman took up the case of Major-General Pyotr Grigorenko, a decorated veteran who had been committed to a hospital for the criminally insane for defending the rights of the deported Crimean Tartars. Gluzman studied Grigorenko's files, concluded he was perfectly sane, and circulated a "Forensic-Psychiatric Diagnosis of P.G. Grigorenko in Absentia"—first anonymously as samizdat, later acknowledged as his own. The document guaranteed his arrest.
Gluzman's lifelong adversary was the Moscow School, whose favourite diagnosis was "sluggish schizophrenia"—a condition whose symptoms were said to be so slow to appear that it could be diagnosed even without them. In practice, anyone who failed to agree that the Soviet polity was the most perfect ever devised could be certified as mentally ill, locked up with violent patients and force-dosed with anti-psychotic drugs. The school held that the mentally healthy man was an unquestioning bourgeois who would never complain or stick his neck out.
Gluzman spent seven years at Labour Colony Perm 35. Conditions were brutal: worn-thin prison clothes in temperatures that sank to minus 50°C, forced naked exercise, greasy soup, dry bread and rotten fish. The slightest insubordination could land prisoners in the cooler—a three-pace cell with water running down the walls. Gluzman was sent there frequently, mainly for organising hunger strikes.
Despite this, he and fellow political prisoners produced about 200 pieces of samizdat a year. Working in the prison shop, he would inscribe messages on long thin strips of paper and secrete them into bags sewn for chain-saws; contacts outside passed them on to the free world.
His most famous work from Perm was the "Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents", co-authored with the writer Vladimir Bukovsky. It advised dissidents on how to behave when psychiatrists tried to have them declared insane: answer questions straightforwardly, make your life history boringly normal, never try to defend your views (as this would confirm "reformist delusions"), and stay firm if injected with sodium amytal.
Gluzman's samizdat campaign helped turn Western psychiatry against the Moscow School while he was still imprisoned. The first international committee to oppose the political abuse of psychiatry was established in Geneva during his incarceration, and the Soviet Union was expelled from the World Psychiatric Association.
He relinquished his Russian citizenship while in Perm. After his release in Kyiv in 1983, he was forbidden from practising psychiatry and waited for an exit visa.
In the late 1990s in Kyiv, Gluzman collaborated with a former KGB member to publish evidence of Soviet repression from the KGB archive. In 1991 he founded the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, set up the first rehabilitation centres, provided proper training for nurses and published manuals on human rights. From 1997—eleven years after the Chernobyl disaster—he conducted deep longitudinal studies of its mental effects on local people.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gluzman refused to leave his 15th-floor flat outside Kyiv, even as lifts failed when power stations were hit.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.